Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute writes in the Wall Street Journal about Andy Stern’s retirement from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). He noted that Stern’s

principal legacy will be having headed up a union that managed to add 1.2 million members during a time when overall unionization rates continued to plunge in the U.S.

But it’s important to understand how Mr. Stern pulled this off, because his union’s story is really the story of the transformation of the labor movement in America. The SEIU did not win its most significant victories on the picket lines, but rather in backroom political deals with legislative leaders, especially in states like California where the political class is already union-friendly.

Those deals helped the SEIU to organize workplaces that are nominally considered part of the private sector but actually are heavily controlled and influenced by government regulation, most especially in health care.

The article mentions Malanga’s forthcoming book, Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer.

Google is “free to be wrong about philosophy, of course,” I wrote. “It doesn’t matter at all—except when Google tries to impose its philosophy on others. And in the debate over ‘net neutrality’ regulation it has done exactly that.”

Now Google is in the sights of those proposing public utility regulation of Internet search. It would be entertaining ironic comeuppance for Google, but “search neutrality” regulation would ossify an innovative business and deprive consumers of the benefits of competition.

If the “Frontline” episode mentioned any of the ways that government created the crisis – cheap money from the central bank, tax laws that encourage debt over equity, government regulation that pressured lenders to issue mortgages to borrowers who wouldn’t be able to pay them back – NPR didn’t mention it.

Last night, thanks to Craigslist and a Web-enabled cell phone, I unloaded two extra tickets to tonight’s World Cup qualifying game between the U.S. and Costa Rica in under an hour. (8:00, ESPN2 “USA! USA! USA!”)

Wanting to avoid the hassle of selling the tickets at RFK, I placed an ad on Craigslist offering them at cost, figuring I might find a taker and arrange to hand them off downtown today or at the stadium tonight. Checking email as I walked to the gym, I found an inquiry about the tickets and phoned the guy, who happened to live 100 feet from where I was walking. A few minutes later, he had the tickets and I had the cash.

This quaint story is a single data point in a trend line—the high-tech version of It’s Getting Better All the Time. Everyone living a connected life enjoys hundreds, or even thousands, of conveniences every day because of information technology. Through billions of transactions across the society, technology improves our lives in ways unimaginable two decades ago.

Before 1995, nobody ever traded spare soccer tickets in under an hour, on a Tuesday night, without even changing his evening routine. If soccer tickets are too trivial (you must not understand the game), the same dynamics deliver incremental, but massive improvements in material wealth, awareness, education, and social and political empowerment to everyone—even those who don’t live “online.”

Sometimes debates about technology regulation are cast in doom and gloom terms like the Malthusian arguments about material wealth. But the benefits we already enjoy thanks to technology are not going away, and they will continue to accrue. We are arguing about the pace of progress, not its existence.

This is no reason to let up in our quest to give technologists and investors the freedom to produce more innovations that enhance everyone’s well-being even more. But it does counsel us to be optimistic and to teach this optimism to our ideological opponents, many of whom seem to look ahead and see only calamity.

So asks the Washington Post in a cogent editorial about FCC Chairman Jules Genachowski’s speech proposing to regulate the terms on which broadband service is provided. (More from TLJ, Julian Sanchez, and me.) The WaPo piece nicely dismantles the few incidents and arguments that underlie Genachowski’s call for regulation.

As the debate about “ ‘net neutrality” regulation continues, I imagine it will move from principled arguments, such as whether the government should control communications infrastructure, to practical ones: Will limitations on ISPs’ ability to manage their networks cause Internet brown-outs and failures? (This is what Comcast was trying to avoid when it ham-handedly degraded the use of the BitTorrent protocol on its network.) Will regulation bar ISPs from shifting costs to heavy users, cause individual consumers to pay more, and hasten a move from all-you-can-eat to metered Internet service? We’ll have much to discuss.

Will Saletan writes that he and his colleagues at Slate seem to be increasingly engaged in libertarian sallies at the food police and other nanny statists. “Are we becoming conservative?” he worries, wringing his hands. Not quite:

We’re what we were five or 10 years ago: skeptics and fact-mongers with a bias for personal freedom. It’s the left that’s turning conservative. Well, not conservative, but pushy. Weisberg put his finger on the underlying trend: “Because Democrats hold power at the moment, they face the greater peril of paternalistic overreaching.” Today’s morality cops are less interested in your bedroom than your refrigerator. They’re more likely to berate you for outdoor smoking than for outdoor necking. It isn’t God who hates fags. It’s Michael Bloomberg.

And as genuine liberals recoil in horror at the actions of liberals with power, it’s a good time to read Damon Root’s new Cato Policy Report cover story on liberals who fled “right” from the economic and constitutional malfeasance of the New Deal. Let’s hope Saletan’s “new Whiskey Rebellion” spreads beyond the pages of Slate.